Fathoms
by MostRemote
Summary: An overzealous end of term party brings Yuugi & co. to Kaiba's door and Jounouchi finds himself on the receiving end of Kaiba's incomprehensible behaviour. Oneshot. Jounouchi/Kaiba.


**A short, not too angsty Jounouchi/Kaiba oneshot.**

**Warnings: language, alcohol, moderate sexual content.**

* * *

><p>It certainly wasn't Kaiba's idea for the party to end up at his place.<p>

Truth be told, Kaiba didn't even know that there _was_ a party, and Jounouchi suspected he wouldn't have cared if he did. Yuugi had tentatively suggested inviting him to their end of exams, end of the high school year blow-out but the disagreements he received from the rest of the group were so vehement, albeit hastily covered up with feigned politeness, that he soon forgot the idea.

Jounouchi didn't even recall that including Kaiba had ever been on the table until about one in the morning, when Anzu, Otogi, Bakura, Yuugi, Honda, and himself were crammed awkwardly and dangerously into Otogi's car, drifting through the night with Bakura, the only sober member of the party, at the wheel.

"Okay... _Okay!_" Honda exclaimed loudly over the chattering. "Where next?"

"Home, perhaps?" suggested Bakura, but he was soon shot down. Even Yuugi seemed up for the festivities to continue, despite having only managed to drink one and a half cans of cheap beer the entire night (and was yet still tinged pink from tipsiness).

"Ice rink!" shouted Anzu into the night, throwing up her hands in delighted, drunk celebration.

"It'll be _closed_," said Otogi.

"We'll break in, no one will know," said Honda, physically hand-waving legality and all etiquette in the heat of joyful, youthful liberation.

Jounouchi didn't know what had made him say it, or even what had made the thought appear in his head in the first place, but he cut over Bakura's polite protestations to breaking-and-entering with a noisy yell of: "We should go to _Kaiba's._"

For a moment the chatter and rabble died out, then Honda gave a whoop. "Yes! Let's go see sad old bastard Kaiba. Man, I bet he owns a _pool_..."

"Oh, _night swimming!_" Anzu exclaimed gleefully. This brought enthusiastic agreement from all, even Bakura who was starting to look a little haggard from the never ending party. How long had it been going now? Nine hours? From the moment the final school bell had gone, to four multipacks of energy drinks and endless cans and bottles of cheap booze they'd smuggled from parents and other older relatives later, the party hadn't let up. The energy was somehow endless, glorious, stretching on forever into the night and the future and buoying them up with it.

But for Jounouchi it wasn't stretching on forever. It stretched to a very definite point, although he didn't know it yet, and that point was the centre of Kaiba's bed.

* * *

><p>"No."<p>

"But Kaiba, we drove all the way across town to see you," said Yuugi, his words unslurred but pitched higher than usual.

"I cannot imagine why you would have thought I'd let you in."

"But it's the end of the year, man!" Jounouchi said, unthinkingly clapping a hand on Kaiba's shoulder and nearly making him stumble. When plagued by a nauseous hangover the next day, he would think back to that moment and realise that the fact that Kaiba, lit almost eerily from behind by the bright lights of the mansion seeping into the dark of his front lawn, didn't hit him back, didn't even insult him, was the first sign that something was _off_.

"I am aware of the date," Kaiba said coldly, staring at the drunk group of teenagers hanging from his front door with slightly perplexed disdain.

"Kaiba, you're not even dressed for bed, so clearly you're staying up," Anzu began to argue confidently, "so clearly you're not tired, so therefore you should totally be up for a celebration." She blinked. "QED."

"_Exactly,_" Otogi slurred.

"Makes perfect sense," Honda concurred.

For a moment Kaiba actually looked as though the sheer illogic of this argument might be enough to win him over, but then he shook his head in despair at their collective drunken stupidity. "No." He paused, then added, "You'll wake Mokuba."

"We'll be _real_ quiet," whispered Yuugi, leaning forward conspiratorially.

"_Like mice!_" said Jounouchi in the loudest whisper humanly possible.

He wasn't entirely sure why Kaiba had stepped aside then. Perhaps he was too exasperated to argue with them any more and a guy with a massive house like him probably wouldn't know they were there from his farflung bedroom or study or wherever. Perhaps some deep, _deeply_ buried part of him didn't want to be left out. Perhaps he felt like owed Yuugi one. Or perhaps he had the whole evening planned out from the moment he opened the door and saw them there and his eyes lingered for the briefest second on Jounouchi's.

Whatever it was, he let them in.

* * *

><p>For about seven minutes Kaiba joined in their festivities, if you could define 'joining in' as sitting stiffly in an armchair and taking exactly two sips from a glass of expensive looking something or other while watching the rest of them play a six way game of Duel Monsters very badly on the carpet. They were making up an entirely new set of completely illogical rules as they went, including such tactical manoeuvres as 'there's a can of beer on the field so all fire monsters get a three hundred attack bonus' and 'Kaiba took a sip of his drink so you automatically forfeit this turn'. The second invocation of this 'rule' might have been what prompted Kaiba to eventually stalk out, although he didn't look as though he had been much enjoying his role as sober spectator.<p>

Perhaps no one would have gone after him if Honda hadn't tried to play 'Kaiba left the room so all dragon monsters must stay in defence mode' and, rather than try and get this rule thrown out so he could play his Red Eyes properly, Jounouchi let himself coast on a sea of heated, drunken, good natured anger and vowed to drag Kaiba back so he could give his Red Eyes whatever attack bonus he decided to invent.

It was taking Jounouchi so long to find Kaiba that he started to worry that he might actually sober up before he found him. He wasn't even sure he knew the way back, so labyrinthine were the endless corridors and stairs of Kaiba's mansion. He had travelled so far that he couldn't even hear his friends' distant drunken chatter any more.

He wandered through endless rooms. A game room, a pool, two kitchens, two dining rooms, enough bedrooms to sleep all the drunken teenagers downstairs and then some, a music room, a library; all, apparently, untouched and unlived in for years, so spotless were they.

None of the bedrooms contained Kaiba or his younger brother and Jounouchi began to worry in a distant, paranoid way if the two of them had left together. Perhaps they were planning to firebomb the house to cleanse it of friendship and non-competitive card games.

But eventually Jounouchi tried the handle of an uninteresting looking door and found himself in a room that actually had someone in it, despite the room having all the warmth and homeliness of a mausoleum. There was a large bed, unslept in, several immaculate black pieces of matching furniture that passed for wardrobes and other storage, and there wasn't much else. It looked more like a showroom than a bedroom.

But by the window, seated in a black leather recliner, sat Kaiba, a book lying limp and unopened in his lap.

To say he looked displeased to see Jounouchi at his bedroom door was an understatement.

"Did you get lost?" he said in a voice that bristled with hostility and hatred in a way Jounouchi had never heard before.

Suddenly, standing there amongst the stark lines of the bedroom and fine, folded sheets, the whole thing about the card game and the dragons and the made up rules seemed completely banal. Jounouchi was actually embarrassed, _ashamed_, even, of himself and his friends. They were supposed to be nearly adults, for god's sake, and this is how they were spending their evening? They were acting like children.

And then he blinked and saw Kaiba for what he really was: a teenage boy sulking in his bedroom because he wasn't enjoying the party and suddenly Jounouchi, for once, felt like the most mature person in the room.

"You're missing the party," Jounouchi said bluntly. "Playing six way Duel Monsters is pretty difficult. You should come and make it seven."

"You _can't_ play six way Duel Monsters," Kaiba said scathingly, slapping his book onto the windowsill with a crack of leather on wood. "What a waste of time."

"Yeah, because you're being _so _productive hiding up here like a spoiled kid," Jounouchi shot back, actually sticking his tongue out, although whether it was to illustrate Kaiba's immaturity or because he wanted to piss him off he wasn't so sure.

For a moment he thought Kaiba might lunge at him, so intense was the anger in his eyes, but then it had gone as swiftly as it had arrived and he was cool as ice again, hostile and withdrawn, staring at Jounouchi with what might be construed by someone who didn't know Kaiba very well as curiosity.

"And you're hiding away up here because...?" said Kaiba, one eyebrow twitching up.

"I'm not _hiding_, I'm... _exploring_," said Jounouchi, thinking that this made perfect sense. And with that nonsensical clarity that comes in the haze of pleasant drunkenness he decided that the most _completely awesome_ thing to do would be to jump on Kaiba's bed.

It was huge, covered in dark blue silk with black and white pillows, and Kaiba actually stood up in shock as Jounouchi launched himself at it. The mattress sprung pleasantly beneath him and for one blissful moment he didn't regret at all giving into his intoxicated impulsivity, fuck the consequences, and the next moment he was regretting it intensely as Kaiba was suddenly on top of him with his hands around his throat. A loose grip, but threatening nonetheless.

"What on _earth_ are you doing?" Kaiba hissed, kneeling beside Jounouchi on the bed and holding him down mostly through the promise of danger the position of his fingers brought rather than actual force.

Jounouchi considered biting out an insult, but some relaxed zen state brought about by the alcohol made him instead raise his head a quarter inch from the bed and look Kaiba challengingly in the eyes. "What are _you _doing?"

For a moment Kaiba maintained the position of his hands, but there was some strain of honest confusion in Jounouchi's voice that made him fall away. What _was_ he doing? Did he plan to strangle Jounouchi? Hardly. But he felt no less enraged.

"Answer my question, idiot."

"Your bed looked comfy, man. And I was right!" Jounouchi jolted himself on the bed, feeling the ridiculously soft sheets shudder pleasantly beneath him. "How can someone as frigid as you sleep on something this comfortable?"

Kaiba stared. "_What?_"

_Wait, shit_. "I meant rigid," he said blankly, but that didn't exactly make a lot of sense either. That was what he meant though, right? "I've never seen you relax for even two seconds. You're like..." He struggled for the right word and something from one of the few quotes he'd memorised for his literature exam that morning gloriously surfaced. "You're _unfathomable_."

Kaiba's staring continued. "How on earth is that relevant?"

_Fuck, not again. _"You know, like the sea, right? You can't... fathom... it. 'Fathoming' meaning... Wait a minute."

Kaiba shook his head in disbelief. "A 'fathom' is a unit of measurement. 'To fathom' as a verb means to understand and so 'unfathomable' means incomprehensible." He hesitated and for a moment Jounouchi thought he was trying to hide a smile. "So you're telling me my bed is too comfortable for someone who's difficult to understand."

"Oh." Jounouchi paused. Then he shrugged it off. "Yeah, that's what I'm trying to tell you."

Kaiba knelt there next to him in silence for the better part of a minute, face expressionless and staring into space. Then he said, surprisingly quietly, "What are you doing up here?"

Jounouchi shrugged. "I came to see if you wanted to play the game."

"You know I don't. If I did I wouldn't have left."

"Whatever. You want to sulk through your own party then that's your own really boring decision."

"It's not _my_ party," Kaiba muttered, more to himself than Jounouchi. And then, quieter, "I never wanted you here."

Jounouchi was never quite sure, either during the moment or later, on reflection, whether or not he passed out for a few moments then. He knew he was _very _comfortable, and the whole half-invented Duel Monsters game just didn't hold any appeal to him any more, so he was quite content to stay lying on that bed. His whole body was warm with alcohol and comfort, the sheets against his face growing not unpleasantly hot as he lay his cheek against them. He had forgotten that Kaiba was still there, or that this was Kaiba's bedroom, or any of the other dull little facts of consciousness that seemed so trivial in the great embrace of this incredibly comfortable bed.

And then there was a hand on his thigh.

It took him a disturbingly long time to realise that the hand was there. It was not until he felt it shifting almost imperceptibly back and forth over the denim of the jeans that he'd changed into at the end of school that he became aware of his existence. It took him even longer to understand that if _he_ was on the bed, and _Kaiba_ was on the bed, and if there was no one _else _there, then the hand belonged to...

"Kaiba?" His voice was incredulous, but Kaiba didn't meet his eyes. He was staring down at the top of Jounouchi's jeans. No, more specifically he was staring at the button, which he slowly reached out to undo. His fingers seemed astoundingly delicate as they slipped the button from its hole and then closed a slender fingertip to a pale thumb over the zip, pulling at it gently and eliciting the slow, metallic vibration of the zip's teeth coming apart.

Then, for a long time, Jounouchi just lay there and Kaiba remained frozen aside from the one hand rubbing very slightly back and forth against his thigh. It must have been at least ten minutes, ten very strange minutes in which Kaiba didn't meet Jounouchi's utterly _what the fuck_ gaze, and then Kaiba suddenly shifted his hands in one quick motion to grip the sides of Jounouchi's jeans and pull at the hem.

He met Jounouchi's eyes, his expression a blank question, and Jounouchi shifted his hips from the bed in reply. He was very drunk and very confused and if Kaiba wanted to pull his jeans off, hey, why not? It couldn't be more insane than anything else so far.

Kaiba didn't hesitate after that. He slid down the bed and dropped his head to Jounouchi's underwear, which was threadbare and grey through endless washes, and rested his lips against the soft flesh within. Then he drew back slightly and dropped his lips again, and again, and Jounouchi realised that Kaiba was actually _kissing _him, kissing his sudden erection (when had _that_ appeared?) with the strangest tenderness.

Jounouchi would have liked to blame the alcohol, but truthfully it was more the surreality of the situation that prevented him from registering he was about to receive a blow job until he was actually inside Kaiba's mouth. His thoughts oscillated from being astounded to a little creeped out and then back to astounded and then instead of disturbed he just felt good and warm and humming slightly from the gently coaxing lips and tongue.

The pleasant confusion held strong until, awfully, it suddenly dissipated in the middle of his sudden, quick orgasm. Then he just felt weird, and cold, as if something from Kaiba had seeped into him and infected him with hate and ice. His body shuddered with an uncomfortable release which displaced the untroubled arousal with sudden, extreme disorientation.

"What the fuck... the _fuck_..." Jounouchi said, the words tumbling forth before he could comprehend exactly which part of his confusion he wanted to articulate. Eventually he decided on something satisfactorily general: "What the fuck are you _doing?_"

Kaiba still had his mouth around him. He drew back leisurely, and Jounouchi stared with something like horror centred around a weird, deep twinge of sexual excitement as he watched Kaiba swallow his ejaculate.

"I assumed from the panting that you didn't want me to stop," said Kaiba, every syllable dripping with challenge and hostility.

"I..." Jounouchi sat up and immediately felt his head fall forwards, quickly raising a hand to catch himself, caught in a whirlwind of nauseous confusion. "I am _so _drunk right now," he muttered, vaguely registering that his jeans were still around his knees.

"You are?" said Kaiba, and suddenly he didn't seem quite as certain as before. "I didn't realise you were that far gone," he continued, which was more of a question than a statement.

"I had, like, half of all the cans of beer that Honda brought, and..." he struggled to remember, fixing on these basic details as he leaned forwards and tried to pull his jeans back up, "and most of Anzu's wine." He managed to pull on his underwear and began to wrestle with the suddenly incredibly complicated fastenings of his jeans. "We've been drinking since school ended. I'm not entirely sure how I even made it to your room."

There was no reply. Jounouchi didn't realise Kaiba had got off the bed until he looked up and saw him standing by the window, looking out into the garden below. He stood there for a long time, and Jounouchi lay back on the bed to try and ease the relentless spinning. The room still shifted about him, refusing to even pay him the courtesy of spinning in one direction. _Man, Kaiba is going to kill me if I throw up in his room..._

"I wouldn't have done it," Kaiba said suddenly, jolting Jounouchi out of his semi-conscious stupor, "if I knew you were that drunk."

"I wouldn't have let you do it if I wasn't," Jounouchi retorted. Even in his less than alert state he saw Kaiba stiffen.

"Then that was sexual assault," he said in a very clipped voice, but there some weird, disgusted fear in there too.

Jounouchi shook his head and quickly concluded that any movement of his head was a very bad idea. "No, no, I was just... Just don't say that, okay? It's not like you knew."

"I should have. I knew you'd been drinking. I should have at least asked permission."

"Yeah, like you ever ask permission for anything," Jounouchi muttered, then replayed the words in his head and winced. "Wait, I didn't mean-"

"Do not try to _reassure_ me, Jounouchi," Kaiba snapped, never taking his eyes from the window. When he spoke again his voice was carefully calm, but Jounouchi could hear the tension in it. "If you want to take legal action against me I'll understand. I won't make it difficult for you."

"What the _hell_, Kaiba?" Jounouchi said in loud shock, the force of his voice sending his stomach spasming again. "You must've done loads of illegal stuff, why would you care about something like this?"

"This is different," replied Kaiba very quietly. "This is me taking advantage of someone who's intoxicated. That's..." He trailed into silence and his jaw visibly clenched.

Jounouchi sighed. He decided to make one last attempt before he gave into either nausea or unconsciousness. "Look, Kaiba," he said firmly, "people get drunk and fuck at parties all the time. And while that was really fucking disturbing it was consensual, okay?"

Kaiba said nothing.

"Seriously, Kaiba, I might not like you but you're not the kind of person who'd knowingly assault someone. Yuugi wouldn't want to be friends with you if you were." He took a breath and closed his eyes, partly to block out the spinning and partly so he wouldn't have to look at Kaiba when he spoke. "It was almost kind of nice, in an incredibly weird way, alright?" He cracked his eyes back open to see Kaiba finally looking at him, expression unreadable. "Just do me a favour and tell me that you get that you didn't do anything wrong so I can pass out in peace, okay?"

For a moment Kaiba did nothing, then he nodded once.

"Good," said Jounouchi, shutting his eyes again and deciding to try passing out now and throwing up later rather than the reverse. He had forgotten about the game his friends were still playing downstairs and their entire end of term party idea, and soon he forgot everything that had just happened as drunken darkness swallowed him.

* * *

><p>"It's just not like him to disappear like that."<p>

"Are you kidding me? It's totally like him. Jounouchi's attitude to responsibility is..." Honda paused. "Well, he doesn't _have_ an attitude to responsibility."

"It's just..." Yuugi sighed. "This just seems a little strange."

Everybody else had left when Bakura had finally given them a 'drive home now or spend the night' ultimatum at three AM, deciding that a twelve hour party was more than sufficient celebration for one day. When a very half-hearted drunken search didn't turn up Jounouchi they had decided to go without him, leaving Yuugi and Honda to finish the search and clean up the mess they'd made in Kaiba's main lounge.

"Look," said Kaiba, who was standing with them in the porch after many attempts to get them to leave his house. They were... _obstinate_, to say the least, when it came to their friends. "My security would know if he had left the grounds, which means he's probably passed out under a desk somewhere. When I find him I'll send him your way." He inhaled sharply, teeth clenching. "Now will you _please_ get out of my house."

Yuugi blushed and dropped his eyes. "Of course, Kaiba. I'm sorry we bothered you so much last night."

"Save it," Kaiba muttered, placing a hand pointedly on the open door. Yuugi and Honda shuffled through and out into the garden, Yuugi offering another parting apology that went unheard as the door shut behind them.

Quiet. Solitude. A sanctity to which he had actually invited invasion, showed it the door, and let it sleep in his bed. And there it still slept, as far as Kaiba knew.

Kaiba had work to do, as he always did. Jounouchi could wait. Of _course_ Jounouchi could wait; he was of no consequence. Kaiba climbed a set of ornate stairs and pushed everything from his mind: Jounouchi, the party, the night before and how he had _debased_ himself...

No. It was of no consequence. Irrelevant.

Again he pushed the thoughts away as he reached the next floor, making the same journey that Jounouchi had made the night before. Kaiba hadn't intended to go back to his bedroom, rather to his brother's to see if he was awake yet, but he was stopped short in the upstairs corridor when his bedroom door opened suddenly. For a brief moment he felt the inexplicable, irrational urge to flee, but he quelled it immediately and stood firm, soon finding himself staring at a bedraggled looking blond boy.

"Hey," said Jounouchi uncertainly. Kaiba said nothing in reply, merely stood stock still and glared. "I only just woke up. Are you... Where did you sleep?"

"In one of the guest bedrooms," Kaiba said curtly. A lie, but if Jounouchi hadn't noticed him lying wide awake beside him he wasn't going to enlighten him.

"Right," muttered Jounouchi. He looked severely hung over. "I, uh, I'm sorry about... Well, everything, I guess."

"About the party?"

"Yeah. And passing out on your bed."

"And?" He wasn't sure what he was trying to get Jounouchi to say, but he was curious how the boy would react.

Jounouchi's eyes dropped. "I'm sorry for not staying up. To talk about it." Kaiba raised an eyebrow involuntarily. He hadn't expected _that_. Jounouchi stuck his hands in his pockets and shifted his feet uncomfortably. "I was really wasted."

Kaiba wanted to give a smartass reply, but something about Jounouchi's exhausted, confused appearance made him hold back. He forced himself to swallow his pride. "Breakfast?"

"Huh?"

"Do you want _breakfast?_" hissed Kaiba, loath to repeat himself on a good day, and whatever kind of day this was it certainly wasn't a good one.

"Oh." Jounouchi's expression brightened with frightening speed. "Sure, I want breakfast. I'm starving anyway and some eggs or something would really help with the hangover."

Kaiba said nothing in reply, simply turned and headed for the kitchen, Jounouchi in tow. One of the house staff prepared everything Jounouchi's overambitious imagination could come up with and Kaiba drank black coffee in silence. He listened to Jounouchi prattle on about end of exams and the food and his friends. He watched his mouth. He wanted to touch him. He wanted to fuck him. He wanted to make him cum again. But he did none of these things, merely sipped his coffee in silence.

Eventually Jounouchi was dissuaded by Kaiba's reticence and fell quiet himself. With the drop in rambling apparently came a drop in his appetite and he stopped devouring the ridiculously large breakfast, instead poking at it disinterestedly.

Kaiba hates this. The social aspect. He hates Jounouchi, for that matter. It's just he hates him in a weird, aching way, in a way that makes him want to keep listening to Jounouchi talk about nonsense for the rest of the day even though it irritates him to no end.

"Is the food not good?" Kaiba asks, aware that the food is excellent. It's always excellent.

"No, it's good," Jounouchi murmurs. He shifts on the high stool beside Kaiba, and Kaiba thinks about putting a hand on his thigh, only he doesn't because he's embarrassed himself enough for one day. Or for one week, one month, one _year_... "Kaiba-"

"_Don't,_" he spits. He can hear the caution, the question, in Jounouchi's voice. Whatever he's going to say Kaiba knows he won't like it.

"I just... I wanted you to know that I'm still okay with it, alright? You're not going to go all weird on me again?"

Kaiba grits his teeth and glares but relief erupts inside him. He should have known better, because of _course_ Jounouchi was very drunk, and he really should have realised that when they were lying on the bed together, but Jounouchi's hopeful smile reassures Kaiba that, no matter how embarrassed he might feel, Jounouchi knew that he hadn't meant to hurt or disturb him. And Kaiba knew, with another great wave of relief, that Jounouchi's experience - which he guessed was his first blowjob, at least from a man - was nothing like his own first time. He hadn't taken advantage of a boy who was too intoxicated to fight back. No matter what, he hadn't become his foster father.

"I am not going to go 'all weird'," muttered Kaiba, and Jounouchi grinned at him. "I would prefer if you didn't tell anybody about what happened."

"Don't worry about it," said Jounouchi through a mouthful of eggs for which he's suddenly regained his appetite. "We can forget it ever happened, if you like," he ventured, but when he sneaks a sidelong glance at Kaiba there's something regretful in his expression, although he says nothing. "_Or_," Jounouchi adds, unsure of exactly what he's suggesting, "you can talk to me about it and stop being so weird and closed off and..." He smiles, a new, private joke. "Unfathomable."

Still, Kaiba says nothing. But he meets Jounouchi's eyes as he sips his coffee, and Jounouchi meets his, and then Jounouchi smiles at him almost sadly and goes back to his meal.

When Jounouchi has nearly finished and Kaiba knows he'll have no excuse to keep him around any longer, he very quietly says, "I don't think even I understand myself."

Again Jounouchi gives him that sad smile. "Yeah, I see that," he says, looking over at the strange, reserved boy sitting beside him, refusing to meet his eyes and clutching his coffee with both hands.

"I hate not understanding things," says Kaiba in that same quiet voice, and stiffens as Jounouchi reaches over and abruptly squeezes his hand, casually, but intimately, and gives him a smile that isn't quite so sad any more.

"I hardly ever understand things," he says. "It's not so bad."

Kaiba runs out of coffee to sip, and Jounouchi runs out of breakfast, but they stay sitting together regardless.

And Kaiba really doesn't understand why he did it, or why Jounouchi didn't turn him down, or why Jounouchi is still sitting next to him and apparently not even minding the silence, but he doesn't try to figure it out. He can let it go, let it drift away into the depths, for once find the confusion and unanswered silence a comfort.

Outside the light is that of a cold Spring, and the holidays stretch out before them and there seems as though there's all the time for confusion in the world. And he doesn't even know why Jounouchi is smiling at him like that, as though _he_ understands, but he doesn't let it bother him and he doesn't push for an answer.

* * *

><p><strong>Thanks for reading. This is just a oneshot so I'll end it here. I considered making it longer, because I feel it ends somewhat abruptly, but it will then stretch on endlessly as my fics tend to do. I originally <strong>wrote it as a mini exercise in writing Jounouchi and Kaiba outside of my darkfic AU, trying to write them more canonically, but it mutated into what I hope suffices as a oneshot. I don't think giving oneshots closure is one of my strengths.<strong>**

**Do review if you enjoyed it, particularly if you have any thoughts on how I've interpreted the characters, because I intend to start a longfic with similar approaches to Jou and Kaiba sometime soon and I'm still testing the waters with how to write them. If you have any constructive feedback about it I'd appreciate it.**


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